New York’s French Animation Festival Animation First Reveals Exciting 2025 Lineup (EXCLUSIVE)

EXCLUSIVE: The eighth Animation First, a French-centric animation festival in New York City, has announced its lineup for its 2025 festival, scheduled to run from Tuesday, January 21, through Sunday, January 26.

The event, curated by Delphine Selles-Alvarez and Chloé Dheu, will include seven feature films and five short film programs, with a focus on Swiss animation.

This year’s highlights include the East Coast premiere of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Most Precious of Cargoes (La plus précieuse des marchandises), which will open the festival, and Claude Barras’s stop-motion ecological tale Savages (Sauvages). The closing night film will feature a science-fiction masterwork by animator René Laloux (Fantastic Planet), with a recently restored of Laloux’s trippy 1982 feature The Time Masters (Les maîtres du temps), which will be screened with Laloux’s short The Machine-Men (Les hommes machines).

Animation First describes its further details of its programming as follows:

Additional features include the US premiere of the restoration of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s classic The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (Les Douze travaux d’Astérix),a the beloved family film My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette) by Claude Barras, the NY premiere of Bertrand Dezoteux’s Harmony (Harmonie), and the NY premiere of Yuku and the Himalayan Flower (Yuku et la fleur de l’Himalaya), by directors Rémi Durin and Arnaud Demuynck. Special to this year will be the US premiere of the first episode of an animated French TV series, The Legends of Paris (L’Armée des Romantiques) by Amélie Harrault. The festival’s five short film programs include The Best of Annecy, New Francophone Shorts 1 and 2, Caught in the Moving Sand: The Films of Gisèle and Nag Ansorge, and Marina Rosset: The Enchanting Power of Animation. Both the Both Caught in Moving Sand and The Enchanting Power of Animation programs are part of this year’s focus on Swiss animation.

Animation First will feature juried competition for its New Francophone Shorts program with jurors including animators Bill Plympton and Noelle Melody, and artist Karlotta Freier. The festival will also include Animation Speak/Easy short film screenings with audience discussion, vr experiences, discussions with animators Boris Labbé, Kristof Serrand, and this year’s poster artist Georges Schwizgebel.

For more details and ticketing information visit the festival website HERE.